Summary

This data collection provides information on multiple
prosecutions for individual offenders. The data are intended for use in
the exploration and description of relationships among the various
elements of the adjudication process (characteristics of the offender
and offense and decisions made by various actors in the prosecution and
sentencing of the offenders). The sampled incidents were drawn from two
types of offenses: residential burglary and armed robbery. The
collection includes only those incidents involving male offenders who
were previously unknown to their victims and who were facing
adjudication in adult court. The data collection instrument probed five
areas for each offender and incident sampled: A. Related Incidents
(information to identify all other incidents for which processing
overlapped that of the sampled incident), B. Incident Description
(information about the criminal incident itself, such as date and
location of the incident, date of arrest, victims, weapons,
accomplices, witnesses, and evidence), C. Adjudication Process
(information such as bond amount, legal representation, adjudication
events and outcomes, date of sentencing, and type and length of
incarceration), D. Defendant (information about the defendant himself,
including date of birth, race/descent, and employment status), and E.
Prior Record (information about the defendant's record, such as his age
at first arrest and first incarceration, the number of times he was
incarcerated, and history of drug and/or alcohol abuse).

Subject Terms

Geographic Coverage

Time Period(s)

1985 -- 1988

Date of Collection

1986 -- 1988

Data Collection Notes

In this hierarchical dataset, an offender may have up
to three record types. The first-level record type (present for every
offender) includes data taken from sections A through E of the main
survey form. A single case may have supplementary B and C records. For
first-level records, there are 661 variables and a maximum record
length of 1,596. For second-level B records, there are 88 variables and
a maximum record length of 147. For third-level C records, there are
235 variables and a maximum record length of 556.

Sample

The jurisdictions to be surveyed were selected according to
three criteria: (1) the inclusion of at least one site in each of the
four major census regions, (2) the inclusion of approximately two sites
per state, and (3) the inclusion of at least one site in New York City.
Within each site, a random sample of armed robbery and residential
burglary cases was selected.

Universe

Criminal cases presented to a prosecutor and involving
armed robbery or residential burglary.

Data Source

intake logs and computerized records of court and other
agency databases

Data Type(s)

Original Release Date

1993-04-09

Version Date

2006-01-12

Version History

1993-04-09 ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:

Standardized missing values.

Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes.

2003-12-02 SAS and SPSS data definition statements have been
updated, and the ASCII codebook has been updated and converted to
PDF.

2006-01-12 All files were removed from dataset 16 and flagged as study-level files, so that they will accompany all downloads.

2006-01-12 All files were removed from dataset 15 and flagged as study-level files, so that they will accompany all downloads.

2006-01-12 All files were removed from dataset 17 and flagged as study-level files, so that they will accompany all downloads.

Notes

The public-use data files in this collection are available for access by the general public. Access does not require affiliation with an ICPSR member institution.

The citation of this study may have changed due to the new version control system that has been implemented.

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